We've been saying that you personally have a loving father who made you part of his only son so that he could express in your life something of himself and could add something to his creation through you.

He also wants you to accept his adoption of you as his child now that you are able to see what life without him is like – that's the other reason you're here on this wayward planet.

But he has foreseen what your reaction would be - so he has in his love remade you and your life and all your circumstances in eternity – in a kind of parallel universe such as the quantum physicists hypothesize.

Living daily in reality is living by faith that the spirit of the creator's son is working with the acquiescence of your human will – inside you - to reconcile your attitude to his - and outside you – to reconcile your circumstances to his will. These are the twin realities of living in reality. Our maker has foreknown all the attitudes that you would have and all the circumstances that you would face – he has borne them all in his only son, neutralized their fatal effects, and recreated them in timeless space so that they can be actualized here. So faith is simply acceptance of that reality.

Thus the 2009 worldwide recession resulted from banks and home-buyers acting as if they had more money than they actually possessed. They were assisted and encouraged to do this by a culture of greed and deception that gripped society in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Desire for the security of things and the significance of conspicuous consumption usurped confidence in a loving Father who knows everyone he has made. Our Maker was not caught off balance, nor are we able without him to rectify the internal and external mess, but he has ! And his son, whom we know in his historical existence as Jesus Christ, is working inside and outside you to manifest this resolution.

So our Maker sees each one of us as we stretch our finances a little more to buy on credit a bigger house or a better car. He provides warning signs along the way as we miss a payment or have an unexpected expense, but we put our trust in the national prosperity and the plentiful loans available. The bankers and the realtors and the stockbrokers all do the same. Meanwhile the international bankers are packaging our loans together with other under-financed loans and using them as partial collateral for even larger commitments, until the whole world pretends it has hundreds of times more money than it actually has. So mankind deceives itself until it is completely dependent on the imaginary financial assets that do not actually exist.

Only the slender thread of true assets continues to be glimpsed by some few financial consciences sensitized by the mysterious grace of our Maker's mercy. Gradually that mercy begins to manifest the stresses and incongruities that are built into the world-system of currencies and deficits, of real estate appreciation and actual housing needs, of commercial expansion of retail malls and actual growth of demand. The Maker allows us to move to the edge of the precipice of unreality and lies so that we see the abyss open before us while his Son's spirit cries out faintly through a few consciences and clear minds that point to a way back.

The urge we have to establish and maintain our autonomy is persistent so that we want to be healed "lightly"; this means we want to be rescued but hope to maintain our trust in ourselves rather than in the faithfulness and authority of some creator-God. Thus there is always this resistant manipulatory streak that carnal nature cannot get rid of by its own power – it seems as if it has been perverted into an alien form which cannot do what it was originally designed to do – live by the power and life of its creator. In the recession of 2009 this will express itself in strong tendencies to paper over dishonesties and apply short-cut cover-ups rather than analyzing carefully the actual errors and lies. Often the complexities of lies and pretense are so layered that many of us will either succumb to suicide or emerge from the recession unwilling to face life without lies and dishonesty.

But our creator allows this kind of disaster to hold the world back from absolute chaos so that each one of us can enter the reality of life with our Maker's attitude and friendship – let's talk about that next time.